This Side of Life

By Thomas Weber Carlsen

” Try to imagine being dumped outside of time in a place where nothing resembles anything you´ve ever experienced before, and where the smells, the sounds, the lights, and the feelings are all different.” Thomas Weber Carlsen´s memoir This Side of Life covers an arduous journey over six decades through the first, the second and the third world, and explores the other side of life, where you are confronted with another you and where everything changes dramatically. From the point of view of a lost soul seeking a deeper truth behind the mundane, material world, This Side of Life begins with Thomas´ fundamental choice to take a permanent vacation from his former life and former self. From Denmark to Cambodia to an island in the Mediterranean Sea, from being single to being a husband and a father of three, and from being lost to being found, This Side of Life is ultimately a spiritual journey towards God.

• Language: English
• Publisher: XinXii
• Release date: Oct 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9783969318812

Book preview

This Side of Life

Part 1: Out of Denmark

Break on through to the other side

Dear reader,

This Side of Life is a brainchild of mine originally conceived in the shadow of the celestial temples of Angkor in Cambodia in Southeast Asia. It started out as a hobby project describing domestic life and the mixed blessings of a marriage between East and West, Cambodia and Denmark, the third and the first worlds. But life tends to have a dynamic of its own – mine certainly does – and over the years the project evolved into a far more critical comment on a fractured world at odds with itself. My life´s journey has taken me to places beyond the reach of most people in the first world, who are held captive there by their own comfort zones, and that has enriched it but also increased my awareness of the problems we are facing.

I thought I wanted to dedicate this work to the young people of the first world, especially the young men there who don't seem to have a lot to say. But then I started writing. And as the words piled up in front of me and I was forced to take a long, hard look at my own soul, I was rather appalled and decided several times to give up the project altogether. I thought it was going to be a book about a first-world man´s adventures in the third world. But then my life took me in another direction. My situation changed; I got older and perhaps wiser, and I soon realized that I couldn't possibly with a clear conscience dedicate this work to anyone, and I certainly can´t recommend anyone follow my example, either. I may have picked up a few survival skills along the way but hardly enough to make it worth a read for that alone. And if you´re looking for a guide to a safe and secure future, you should similarly keep looking elsewhere. Ultimately this book is for my beloved children in the hope that in it they may find some means to define for themselves who their father is (or was, as it happens), and thereby create a deeper understanding of who they've become.

As you’ll notice, music has been a faithful companion of mine through this life since the Sixties. I´ve been inspired and comforted by it, and I´ve wanted to bring it into the sphere of these tales whenever it seemed fit. For a long time, I thought the title of my book was going to be Third World Man, a title borrowed if not stolen from one of my favorite songs by Steely Dan, one of my all-time favorite bands. And then my life changed and brought me away from the third world and into the second, and then the title of the book had to change to go along with it. But the music remained the same, my true inspiration. And when the music is your special friend you want to keep it alive, so feel very welcome to listen to these powerful songs on YouTube or wherever as you read along.

Don´t for a moment think that every word you´re going to read in here is the naked truth. It isn´t. I´m as reliable as Captain Jack Sparrow when it comes to giving directions, and I would probably only get in trouble with one authority or another if I tried to write the whole truth and nothing but the truth, for this is in many ways a crooked tale. But I do hate telling a lie, and all I really want is to be as truthful as I can. So I´ve taken the liberty to rearrange certain historical and biographical details to create a work with some narrative integrity – although not necessarily an accurate record of actual events – and I must caution you to read the following chapters with due diligence, and as much in between the lines where the truth always lies.

In the pursuit of this elusive truth, I find myself engaged in an ever-deepening relationship with Jesus; and as this relationship evolves, so does my experience with love and life in general. And while the mundane world becomes more and more fragmented, paranoid, and senseless to me, and I am torn apart in trying to find my own path through this cyber-maze of lies, I seek refuge in family and friendships, and the only really good news out there in a world gone dangerously mad.

This Side of Life is a labor of love spanning more than ten years. At times it has been sitting idle for months while at other times I´ve hardly been able to keep up with it. You know how life goes. I feel that I've taken a lot of people hostage in writing it because their lives have been intertwined with mine, and I´ve been inspired by them and used their stories in this personal context, but I´ve not always had the opportunity to ask them permission to do so. I sincerely apologize if this is causing anybody any embarrassment. Naturally, over the years, the book has evolved as I have evolved. But I´ve tried to keep the chronology of events as and when they happened, and I´ve tried to remain faithful to the person I was at the time of writing without glossing things over in a later phase of edition. This Side of Life is essentially a compilation of snapshots of a life in motion that may or may not make sense in a wider context. Only you can decide.

A Perfect Plan B (My Life in B Minor)

come inside, see my mind in kaleidoscope

My life here in the third world really is a plan B. It certainly wasn´t in the cards that I should end up with a mixed family in a dirt-poor Southeast Asian country when I was born into a well-situated upper-middle-class family in Denmark these many years ago.

The Danish society in the late Fifties was safe, well-structured, and comfortable to the point of boredom. Despite the Cold War syndrome, which everyone seemed to be suffering from in those days, technological progress was perceived first and foremost as a positive thing, and Danish engineers and Danish designers were at the forefront of this revolution. Our dairy products and bacon were being exported worldwide. We´d escaped the maelstrom of World War II relatively unharmed, and the future seemed bright and promising.

I was their first child, the desired boy of my mom, the pride of my dad, a little prince, and I knew it. We lived comfortably in a suburban environment with lots of space, fresh air, and freedom for me to roam around as I pleased. I loved those early years, and I treasure them to this day. My parents were well-educated and well-respected, and I guess that if everything had gone according to my mom’s wishes, I would by now have been a well-respected and respectable scholar in some higher position within the academic world of my university hometown of Aarhus by the sea of Kattegat. As things turned out though, this couldn´t be much further from the realities of my life as it is today.

I must have been a disappointment to her just as I was an enigma to my dad and a puzzle to so many other people. I know I was all of that to myself for a very long time. But then again, nobody – not even my mom – could have foreseen what the world would come to in the span of fifty years.

It sparked off a massive positive momentum for me when I made that fundamental decision some fifteen years ago to take a permanent vacation from my Danish existence. It was very much like having a straitjacket removed, and then suddenly my stifled life came bursting out. Or like watching a movie in black and white on TV and then watching it change into colors, as we did back in the early Seventies. A lot of things started happening by some grander design than I could ever conceive myself, and in a very logical order, too. Now I have a life which I never had in Denmark, I´ve got a family of my own which is something new and wonderful, and I´ve made exiting uses of my education which I was never able to back then. I have in fact become much the man I always wanted to be but never was before.

Today, I look back and contemplate the results I´ve achieved so far, and I wonder how it all happened. I live in my own villa designed and built by myself on my own land surrounded by my own family; I´m my own boss and master of my own destiny. And all of that in a small dirt-poor third-world country devastated by war for decades and with a much less than perfect government.

This is the tale about how I escaped the first world seeking shelter in the third world, and how that escape affected my evolution as a human being in many profound ways.

One crucial aspect of my life here in Cambodia is the mental transition I´ve been able to make by this radical change of natural, cultural, and social environment. Until the time I made the decision to leave Denmark, everything I ever attempted inevitably went wrong. It was like one of those drawn-out nightmares where you desperately try to run away from something or someone closing in on you, and your body refuses to respond. For a long time, I was in a state of schizophrenia, traveling back and forth between my old native country and my new country of choice until I finally made up my mind to settle down here permanently. But that very condition of losing my familiar self for a while has allowed for a deep inner process of upheaval to take place whereby my old traumas have been effectively dissolved.

In the process of leaving Denmark, I´ve literally as well as symbolically thrown away a lot of unnecessary luggage along with much of my old identity, and now I experience a feeling of coming together like never before. Perhaps that new wholeness is also connected with the death of my father a few years ago. I´ve always regarded him as my personal nemesis, and his passing has at the same time been a great relief and a much greater sorrow than I could ever have imagined. But now that he´s gone, I don´t have the same compulsory sense of belonging to Denmark anymore. I have been set free.

This serendipitous third-world life of mine hasn´t always been a walk in the park. Countless times over the past ten years it´s been hanging by a thread, and even today I can´t say that our survival here is secured by any means at all. But that´s probably the reason why I feel so very much alive. There´s always this bend a little further down the road and this great unknowing of what lies beyond it. I have to keep my eyes wide open at all times – and that´s one lesson you need to learn while living in the third world – but I do feel that I´m guided and protected by some greater force than my own, and for that I´m eternally thankful.

Chan

Can I stay here for a while?

Can I see your sweet, sweet smile?

My marriage to Chan is such a typical third-world affair. She wanted something, and I wanted something, and so we struck a deal. That´s not to say that we don´t like each other. These days we´re even attempting to love each other.

She´s out of a family with eleven children, born on the threshold to the national holocaust, the disastrous rule of the Khmer Rouge. Through the following decades of war and turmoil, she and her family survived by sticking together and making ends meet one way or another and with the combined effort of everyone at hand. She never got a lot of schooling; there wasn´t time and money enough. She never even finished grade seven. And when she´d come home from school, there wasn´t enough food for her there either, so she´d go out into the nearby forest and find some for herself. Back in those days, there was always a forest nearby, and people survived that way.

This is how I see her in my mind: a young girl with a large tray on her head from which she sells fruit and things on the street while smiling all the while. A busy bee, in many ways the pride and certainly the main asset of her family, and in that sense, it was no coincidence that it was her that I met at the central market in Battambang all these many years ago, when I walked in there one afternoon with my trousers torn looking for somewhere to fix them. She was standing in her family’s flower shop and characteristically the only one around who spoke any English, which is why she could guide me to the nearest seamstress. And while the job was being done, we – I with a checkered scarf wrapped around me – started getting to know each other. I guess it´s fair to say that we´re still in that process.

I had hoped that she would be sweeter and softer than she is – I like girls being very sweet and very soft – but I guess that´s part of the deal, because I also need her to be a hard-working housewife, a good mother, a tough negotiator when we have to confront the local authorities, and someone I can rely on in general. She´s all of that. She has told me how she once saw a young Cambodian thief being burned alive by the Thais just across the border in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge regime. They stuck him inside a car tire filled with gasoline and let him burn to death in front of a large crowd of Cambodians to teach them all a lesson not to steal. She still remembers his screams. I sometimes wonder what it does to people to be exposed to violence like that.

Chan wanted a way out of poverty and a ticket out of Cambodia. Like so many other third-world people, she firmly believed that the United States and Europe were where the rainbow ends, and everything turns into solid gold. And solid gold is what you want more than anything when you´re used to a constant scramble for survival. She could have chosen among any of a number of Western men who came to work in Battambang in the Nineties to lead her there; she was exposed to a lot of them as the caretaker of a child of an Italian/Belgian couple both of whom were working as administrative personnel during the United Nations’ peacekeeping mission to Cambodia. But she chose me, and I couldn´t have been a less suitable candidate. For one thing, I was never able – or even interested – in making a large sum of money. And secondly, I too wanted a one-way ticket out of my troubled past and had decided to place my bid on Cambodia. Clearly Chan must have brought this irony of fate down upon her head by some serious wrongdoing in an earlier incarnation. A case of bad karma. Our mismatch has created monumental clashes and bitter disillusions over the years, but for better or worse we´re still together and still in Cambodia.

My relationships with Danish girls never worked. I knew plenty of girls once I had overcome my initial shyness of women but never anyone steady enough to be called a girlfriend. There was a good reason for that. I was always looking for an opportunity to leave Denmark, so whenever a girl came too close, I backed out. There was no way I wanted to get trapped there. But I had been searching for a Cambodian wife for quite a while when I met Chan.

Was it just luck that led me back to her house that late evening after having hitchhiked all afternoon on a petrol truck along the bumpy road to Battambang for a quick goodbye before setting off in the early morning to shoot my first video documentary in the remote province of Ratanakiri? I had been to her family’s house before, but only during the daytime, and I didn´t remember the exact way through this maze of narrow paths so typical of Cambodian villages which have been gradually absorbed into the urban structure of the country’s second-largest city. At any rate, there I stood outside the big iron-gate where she came out to meet me in her pajamas surrounded by a pack of fiercely barking dogs. And it´s a fact that we left together the following morning against her father’s will, after she´d asked me if I needed someone to cook and clean and assist with the translations and everything once I got to my destination. I had never given that side of the project a single thought, and to me it sounded like a brilliant idea.

In Ratanakiri, we became lovers from the very beginning. It was such a sweet time. We were surrounded by the remains of one of the greatest rainforests in Cambodia and a lot of sorry-looking ethnic minorities that seemed to have seen better days, the so-called hill tribes, whom I had come up there to record on video before their ancient culture completely disintegrated. And we proved to be a very efficient team together. Her father incidentally is a video maker as well – wedding videos and Buddhist ceremonies and all those important occasions that need to be preserved for eternity – so the work as my assistant came quite natural for her. Of course, she was a great cook and housemaid already, and although sexually inexperienced she was a keen learner. People liked us there, especially the ethnic minorities for whom I felt a lot of compassion, and Chan has a way with people to make them think that she is so adorable – and she really is, mostly. It´s hard to imagine a more promising start to a lasting relationship.

When Chan first came to visit Denmark more than ten years ago, it was something of an eye-opener to her. I remember with delight those early days and the way I too began looking at my own country through her eyes. One of the first things she noticed was the dogs and how they´re treated with constant attention and intimate affection by their owners. And then she said something I’ll always remember with a particular fondness, In my next life, I want to be a dog in Denmark! This reveals something about Chan and the conditions of life in the third world and the beliefs and aspirations of such people. But it also tells something about the Danes and their extraordinary attachment to dogs, perhaps as a substitute for the lack of any deeper relationship with another human being. I´ll take this opportunity to let you in on a terrible secret: there´s a numbing loneliness among people there. Believe me, I know.

She said something else that I remember well, In Denmark, the women are stronger than the men. She sensed that very early on, and I guess it´s true. Feminism has a long and exceptional history in that part of the world, and we consider it progress, the ultimate achievement of a strong democratic and egalitarian tradition, a proof of the prowess of our sophisticated civilization and a tribute to the virtue of our enlightened women. In my younger years, I would feel intimidated by these aggressive women, demanding ever more rights and freedom. I wasn´t too sure about my own rights and my own freedom back then.

Chan changed when we married, and she became a mother. It was as if she started rebelling for the first time in her life and suddenly regarded me as her oppressor. She probably never had the time or the opportunity before, and now for some reason I became the target of a lot of negative feelings. The early years of Amanda’s life were filled with painful incidents and accusations that I don´t want to relate here in any detail. Maybe she felt trapped. Maybe she was losing that maiden dream of the white knight in the shining Mercedes Benz and realizing that she would never live in California. Whatever the reason, this is where the hard times began, and I had to learn to stand up to her and shout her in the face when I felt she had gone too far. And that´s not an easy thing to do with a one-year-old baby girl staring at you in bewilderment and fear.

I´m sure somebody has been trying to tell you that there´s such a thing as love at first sight and that someday you´ll just happen to fall into it. That´s all first-world talk. Let me tell you that love is hard work, every day and every night. Love is a commodity here in the third world, something to be advertised at the sumptuous wedding party and afterward ignored as an expendable luxury in the everyday struggle to survive. But Chan takes her love and her life seriously, and she´s not easy to please in that respect. Maybe the same can be said of me, so naturally we have our ups and downs. I could write pages about her imperfections, but I won’t.